Chapter 29
SOPHIA
I scream and kick at the trunk but to no avail. Whoever is driving doesn’t lose a beat, speeding down the street. I’m rocked around in the trunk, rattling around, and it makes me nauseous.
I breathe in deeply through my nostrils, trying to calm down before I throw up all over myself. I’d grabbed Luca’s phone, texted Scott three words.
It’s Soph. Help.
I can only hope that he can track Luca’s phone. If he does, it’ll take him to the cottage, but maybe from there…
I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going to get out of this.
Rosie girl, I’m so sorry. I tried so hard to get back to you.
The trunk swings open and I throw out my fists, connecting with some masked man’s face. He yelps and punches me in the face, and all the sound goes out of the world.
All I can hear is a distant ringing in my ears, my vision blurring as he scoops me out of the trunk, walking me up steps into a house. Soon enough, I’m tossed into a room, and I bounce off the wall, crying out as I bruise my hipbone.
I pace around, trying the window. It’s painted shut, much like the cottage.
I look up at the high ceilings. This place is about five times bigger than the cottage, with vaulted ceilings.
I try to look out of the blinds, but it’s pitch-black outside.
I don’t even know what time it is. Scott will probably be asleep. Maybe the text didn’t even send…
I slap myself across the face, feeling my heart race, starting to panic. The pain brings me back around and I try the door. Of course, it’s locked. From the outside. A deadbolt, like the one at the cottage.
This has to be Nico’s doing. What if I’m at the Rossi mansion right now? It’s not like a SWAT team is going to come in and save me, not here. They won’t risk coming in, not like this.
I have to stop thinking so negatively. I have to fight to get back to my daughter, fight to get back to Luca. I almost told him, almost told him that we have a daughter, that I want him to meet her.
Because I do. God help me, I do want them to meet. I do want him.
I don’t know how to reconcile that with the part of me that’s a cop, the part of me that wants to take down his entire empire. But I want him. I love him.
But he hadn’t said it back. Maybe he doesn’t feel the same way, or maybe we just got interrupted. I guess I’ll never know.
“You will,” I say to myself out loud, trying to figure something out. I pace around for a while before banging on the door. “I have to pee!”
“I’ll bring you a bucket,” the voice from beyond the door says, and my heart drops. I don’t recognize the voice, but I wouldn’t. I only knew mobsters from dossiers, not from real life. Except for Luca and Diego, now.
I have to be ready.
I sit on the edge of the large bed in the center of the room, coiled and ready to strike. When the deadbolt clicks open, I sprint toward the door and end up banging against a solid chest.
When I look up, I recognize the eyes. Green, like Luca’s. Like Rosa.
“Nico,” I breathe.
“I see my reputation precedes me.” He smiles as if we’re old friends having a conversation.
“You tried to kill him.”
He tsks. “Like I told my brother, if I’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead. I just wanted to give him a little warning.”
I wrench away from him, running for the exit, but he groans and grabs me around the waist, pulling me up against his chest. My skin crawls when he trails his fingers down my arm.
“You are pretty. For a cop.”
I freeze, all of my muscles going stiff. “I’m not a—”
“Sophia Bianchi. Detective.”
His words make my blood run cold.
“You think I’d let my brother kidnap a cop and I wouldn’t know about it? Please, Sophia. Give me a little credit.”
I look up at him and realize how completely he’s misled Luca. Diego. All of us. No one thought he was capable of staging a coup, but he’s clear-eyed, determined. He’s planned this. Meticulously.
And nobody saw it coming, except for the Chicago PD. And even they didn’t know the extent of Nico’s betrayal.
“What are you going to do to me?” My words come out cracked and scared.
“Why, I’m going to use you, of course. As bait for my brother.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
He seems to think about for a moment, his arms like iron around me.
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.”
He grins and shoves me against the wall. Startled, I hit the wall, my cheekbone slamming against the dry wall.
It nearly knocks me out, my vision going blurry around the edges. I brace myself against the wall, sliding slowly down it as Nico leaves the room, leaving me alone in the dark. I crawl along the floor, reaching up to hit the light switch.
Dim light casts my shadow on the wall. My shadow and nothing more. It’s late, god knows what time it is. Is this it? Is this the last night of my life? Will I really never make it back to my Rosie girl?
I lie on the floor for a few moments, feeling sorry for myself. My father always told me to pull myself together, to fight for what I want. And above all else, what I want is to see my little girl again, introduce her to her father.
The only way I can make that happen is to get the hell out of here.
Scott will track me. I know he can. He’s always been a bit of a tech whiz. I think he’s wasted as a beat cop. He really should have gotten my promotion. But he’d never wanted it. He’d been perfectly happy bringing in the same perps every month.
Not like me. I had to have more. Was never satisfied.
“When humans get satisfied, they die,” my father used to tell me when I’d complain about this or that. “As long as you desire something, you’re alive, Sophia.”
I keep lying there, taking in deep breaths and trying to calm myself.
I’m never going to get anywhere if I don’t keep myself together.
I fight the tears burning at the backs of my eyes, still thinking about my father.
His warm brown eyes. The weathered skin of his hands, the callouses there.
Holding his hands in mine always reminded me how hard he worked, how much he sacrificed for me.
For Rosa.
He never asked me who the father was. He just told me he was happy to have such a beautiful granddaughter.
I will see him again. I’ll see Rosa again.
There’s something stuck at the back of my mind, something important, but I can’t suss out what it is. I close my eyes, letting my mind wander.
“I’m going to show you something, Sophia,” he said to me, one night when there wasn’t much to do and it was raining outside. “But you have to promise not to use it unless you really, really have to.”
“To use what? What are you going to teach me?” I bounced on my heels, excited to learn anything from my father. I’d been about thirteen, maybe, just growing the buds of breasts.
“You can only use it if you’re in danger. Trapped. Not to steal,” he warned me, pulling a satchel from his back pocket. “I’m going to teach you with tools, but you can use anything. A hairpin. A credit card. Best if you have both.”
As I watched, eyes wide, my father taught me how to pick the deadbolt on the front door of our house. It took hours for me to get it, and hours still after that to figure out how to do it with only a hairpin.
“But Papa, why would I need to know this?”
“Everyone isn’t kind, Sophia,” my father said in a low voice.
How right he’d been.
My eyes pop open and I search my hair, hoping against hope I hadn’t lost the bobby pins I’d put in after my last shower, the ones I’d worn the first night I was taken. Thank god, I find one, then two. I let out a long breath through my nostrils.
Would have been nice to remember when I was first kidnapped.
I sit up on my knees, walking slowly toward the door, and starting work on the lock.
I’ve got to focus, so that I can see my daughter again. So I can finally tell her father she exists.